Rocío Fatás

EHC

Week 2: Srishti – W4aW

January 29, 2018 by rociofatas

Day 3January 16, 2018

Students present a piece of their work that they like and or find interested in. I get to see where they are at in their practice, and who they are in their artwork and approach to data visualisation. Then I show them some of my work and let them ask questions.
During the second part of the day, they create models of the story that they collected the data from in the previous class.

Day 4

January 17, 2018

In the morning session, one of the students shares her work (she didn’t yesterday). Then we all reflect on the links between our projects and the concept of data visualisation through storytelling.

Then we talk about our positioning in the project, what do they feel are their weaknesses, their strengths, their fears…?

Finally, Venkat comes by and talks a very brief introduction to the concept of data visualisation.

In the afternoon, each student presents a different methodology that they felt was helpful to them or is relevant to what we are doing.

Students pair up and interview each other. They imagine one of them is an expert in the project: ‘Wish For A World’, and the other is collecting data from the interview. We bank both the conclusions as well as the questions.

Questions:
1. What is Wish for a World?
2. What role do you play?
3. What would you do if you had access to all the data of the world?
4. What do you think a better world looks like?
5. Who do you want a better world for?
6. What object should not exist in your better world?
7. What object should exist in the better world?
8. Why wish for a better world?
9. What was your inspiration behind this?
10. How do you plan to do this project?
11. What are the wishes you personally would want to make with?
12. Why do you think there is need for a better world?
13. Are you hopeful about world?
14. What does this project feel like?
15. What could be negative aspects of this project?

Conclusions:

Day 5

January 18, 2018

Morning: ethical discussion about potential negative impacts of ‘Wish 4 a World’, and how to solve associated problematics. Then Venkat came along and introduced Data Exploration as a concept. They installed R and R-Studio. Srishti’s library DB was used as a reference to understand both the software and data analysis with R.

In the afternoon there was a discussion leading us back to our reasons for choosing this project. We shared potential outcomes (they have started, some of them, getting a clear picture of their concept; others are clear on the output, but not the content).

Tomorrow Venkat is coming, we will discuss the AQAL framework in the morning. In the evening they will start exploring their concepts and/or outcomes. We must mix them with both Sprockler, and W4aW as concepts.

NOTE: explore research around Data Visualisation (DV) and Complexity Theory.

2. We learnt some basics of ‘R’ (RStudio) with Venkat, understanging some basic functions through the use of the console. We visualised some data from the mtcars collection. We installed ggplot2(visualisation) and tidyer.

Afternoon:
3. After lunch we attended a class with a doctor that uses communication to educate communities. He has access to many health related data in empoverished and opressed communities throughout the country, plus his daughter is a faculty at Srishti as well. His talk gave a strong idea to put ‘Wish 4 a World’ in relation to other data (for portraiture, like for instance, the type of food people eat). We want to keep in touch with him.

4. I received an email from Lisette (Sprockler), informing her partner is preparing the data of their project around access to justice in Pakistan, which made me feel relief. We still need to discuss the practicalities of our exchange, including monetary ones.

5. We have created a matrix with the variables for our pojects (both, the students and mine), so that they could relax a little over the weekend, as well as start thinking of how they are going to plan their work.